"Role Of Schools In Employment: Does Employability Skills Root In School?"

In the panel discussion of "Role of Schools in Employment", the different panelists participated and shared their views about the employabilities skills. Ashok Pandey, Chairman, NPSC and Principal. Ahlcon International School, who was moderator for the session started the conversation by asking what type of employability skills required for the professional development and what will be the future of education.

Priyamvada Taneja, Accreditation Manager, International Baccalaureate, India, said, "Attitudes are the key, living for a cause and teaching responsible behaviour to the children is of key importance. There are people who are talking about including these necessary elements in the curriculum, however, even after you include it we need to figure out if we are being assessed on them or not in order to make a difference in the systems and processes.

Lina Ashar, CEO, Kangaroo Kids Education, said, "Content is no longer the king, it's the usage or modification of the content that you do which makes a difference in consumption patterns; in what the kids consume. I see the future of education moving with the skills on CV's, that overwhelmingly don't even exist now. There will be a time soon where you will not need to even pay a fraction of what a doctor or lawyer charges you today. We need to think beyond what bots and internet can do, craft future based on your thoughts. Our board and education is are redundant, it needs to make us think, 'What impact do you want to make?, what problems you want to solve?, what mode of innovation do you want to use?"

While talking about the skills and how it can be achieved, Col. Gopal Karunakaran, CEO, Shiv Nadar Schools, said, "School don't teach skill, it can be something you do with yourself."

Viraj Jit Singh, CMO, Kidzania, said, "We work for something which combines fun and learning - indoor theme park; as education is all about empowering children, we do it through work through role play, as we have discovered that children can only aspire to be one of the people from their surroundings, if they don't learn it in there will be gender and class biases that will exist and grow with them."

Anil Mammen, Chief Learning and Design Officer, Tata ClassEdge, said, "What are exactly traditional and modern teaching methods, are they different from each other?

Yes, the difference is just the same as Cassettes to mp3 to soundcloud. But the basic question is, "How do you enhance the way of teaching, like interactive map in classrooms, invest more in personalizing technologies & searches, just as we talk about deep technology and AI learning."

Sugata Ghosh, Director, Global Academic Publishing, OUP, said, "We should be talking in terms of accessibility, pricing, endurance, quality given ultimately a sense of measurement of a top class quality, if we invest in education. If we are not able to measure the input or estimate the output , it is going to be very difficult embrace technology in full capacity."

Shantanu Prakash, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Educomp Solutions, said, "Is technology a solution to everything? Probably not, but technology can be a part of every solution. It will play a big role in the future of education but we have to navigate safely through the technology."

Ashwini Duggal, COO, Mappr, said, "Technology is very necessary for education development. But the most important is how to use and how much we should use the technology. We should look at the part of technology which is actually necessary for education."

Rohit Bhayana, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, ?Lumis Partners, said, "We are a private equity fund and we invest in education, skill, in the rational world and we chose to do that alone. My investment in education was at a time when educators did not include technology in teaching and outputs could take years to assess. But now Technology has brought cognitive impacts in a much more faster, in a speedier way."